- Thank you for visiting this video segment
for Dr. AFib, I'm Dr. Morales.
Dr. AFib is your expert source
on questions about living with atrial fibrillation.
In today's video segment, we're gonna go back
to the most fundamental question about atrial fibrillation.
What is atrial fibrillation?
I'm surprised that even recently,
I got asked this question by a patient,
"What is atrial fibrillation?"
And it just relates that how many patients
just don't understand what atrial fibrillation is.
Now, whenever I explain atrial fibrillation,
I always start off with the basics
about what is the term.
The word atrial comes from the upper chambers of the heart,
which are called the atrium.
And in atrial fibrillation, the atrium
are doing what's called fibrillation,
which means it's going so fast,
instead of squeezing like normal,
it's kind of just quivering and going very fast.
Atrial fibrillation affects millions
of Americans across the United States
and over 30 million patients across the world.
So, let's start off with the most basic things
about a normal heartbeat.
In a normal heartbeat, the heartbeat starts
at the right upper chamber of your heart
in an area called the sinoatrial node.
That's sorta your natural pacemaker,
which drives your heartbeats.
Starts off there, goes to the middle portion of your heart,
and then it goes down to the ventricles,
which is where your pulse comes from.
So when you feel and check your pulse,
that's the ventricles that you are feeling there.
However, in atrial fibrillation,
those upper chambers of your heart
instead of beating in that coordinating together fashion,
they are beating very rapid and very chaotically,
and they can be beating
up to 600 beats per minute even more than that.
And so again, the atrium in atrial fibrillation
are just going so rapidly, they're just quivering
and going very chaotically
and there's no coordination between the contraction
of the upper chambers of the heart.
Fortunately, your pulse, which comes again
from your ventricles,
cannot go as fast as the atrium are going,
but still can go very rapid,
easily can go 120 beats per minute,
and in some patients go much faster than that,
150, 180, even 200 beats per minute.
So, it can make the heart go very, very fast.
Now how does atrial fibrillation feel?
People feel it very differently.
The most common way that people feel atrial fibrillation is
a feeling of a fast heartbeat,
or kind of a skipping or racing of the heart.
And that's probably the most common symptom
that people feel.
But some people feel more subtle symptoms.
They'll just feel maybe a bit more tired,
or short of breath, you just notice
that you don't have as much energy
when you're having episodes of atrial fibrillation.
In addition, there are patients
out there who truly feel nothing.
Their heartbeats can be going very fast,
150, 180, and they truly feel nothing.
And a lot of times in these situations,
the atrial fibrillation is found accidentally,
like when you go to your primary care doctor's office,
and they listen to you, and they listen
to you with their stethoscope,
and they realize your heart rate is going very fast.
And so, these can be diagnosed accidentally
in a variety of patients.
But, even though there's variety
of the way the symptoms, the way the patients feel
with atrial fibrillation,
probably the most dramatic consequence
of having atrial fibrillation
is risk of stroke.
Atrial fibrillation dramatically increases
your risk of stroke.
Anywhere from 1% who have
for patients who have lower risk factors
for atrial fibrillation,
to all the way up to 18% increase
of atrial fibrillation for people
who have multiple risk factors for risk of stroke.
So, there's a wide variety into ways
of how atrial fibrillation can affect you,
affect your heart, and also affect your risk of stroke,
which is important to discuss with your doctor
to make sure you're on proper treatment
and proper management for risk of stroke.
Thank you for visiting this video segment for Dr. AFib.
I'll see you next time.